1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of electronic watch circuits, and more particularly integrated watch circuits having a plurality of operational modes.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the conventional integrated circuit watch counters, which also function as frequency dividers, are used for both counting and storing the time for display. Proper carries and adjustments in regard to seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years is made by means of gated couplings among the various counters. For an integrated circuit watch having a single display, such as hours, minutes, seconds, and date, this type of circuit can be economically employed. If a stop watch or chronograph operational mode is added to such a watch, or if an additional watch display is desired, the states of each counter must be selectively gated to the display device by means of an appropriately hard-wired logic circuit. As the number of operational modes increases, the complexity and the number of logic gates necessary to selectively display the states of each counter increases nonlinearly. Moreover, whenever market demands for various operational modes chnges, the logic circuit must be redesigned. This increases the cost and time necessary to obtain production quantities of new watch circuits capable of satisfying new and diverse consumer demands.
What is needed is a low cost, low power integrated watch circuit capable of operating in a plurality of watch or chronograph modes and capable of being easily modified to operate in a plurality of selected modes.